Monday, December 22, 2014

I glanced over at the newspaper someone was reading at the next table in the library, and saw this:

From the point of view of a Cowboys fan, I imagine, the word would be "victory" or "success," not "disaster." Which is why I keep laughing, albeit bitterly, at sports fans. One fan's disaster is cause for another's celebration, so why should I take either side seriously? I had a vague impression that one trait of an adult is the recognition that the world doesn't revolve around one's own provincial or personal associations. If my beloved dumps me, I can reasonably be very upset, even take to my bed for days of weeping. But if I think that the rain outside shows that the universe is weeping with me, I'm childish at best, delusional at worst. Yet the sports fans I know have no such perspective.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Daniel Larison has written severalgoodposts on President Obama's move to resume diplomatic relations with Cuba. Today he took Marco Rubio to task for saying the predictable stupid hawkish things about it:

There is no good reason for the U.S. and Cuba not to have normal
relations today, and so we should have them. If the U.S. refused to have
normal relations with every state because of its authoritarian
character or the abuses it has committed, as Rubio claims to want, it would have to shut down its embassies in half the countries around the world.

But then he wrote something just about as absurd as anything Rubio had said:

That is especially true in those states that mistreat their people and
govern in an authoritarian and abusive fashion. These are the states
that most need to be opened to outside influences, and they are the
states that are often the most opposed to the U.S. Having diplomatic
representation in these countries not only helps to secure U.S.
interests there, but it also provides an opening for communication with
the people of that country.

I know Larison knows better than this, because he wrote in this very piece that "The U.S. maintains normal relations with all kinds of governments, including some of the very worst in the world." I go further than that, and want to stress that the US has excellent relations with numerous very repressive governments, indeed with "those states that mistreat their people and govern in an authoritarian and abusive fashion." Far from viewing this state of affairs as a distasteful Realpolitik necessity, our rulers are quite enthusiastic about right-wing dictators. I doubt Rubio is an exception to this rule. It's simply false that such states "are often the most opposed to the U.S." Sometimes, yes, they are; but often they are quite friendly with us.

Once we've removed a turbulent, excessively democratic government, we train the new regime’s police in techniques of torture. I don’t
know if it’s still true that there’s a positive correlation between a
state’s human rights abuses, positive investment climate, and the amount
of US aid it receives, but it was true until the 1980s at least. Far
from opening such countries to outside (presumably ameliorating)
influences, having good relations with the US protects them from such
influences. Apologists for this tendency, who are of both parties, tend
to adopt an extreme cultural-relativist position: Oh, Those People
don’t feel pain the way we do, life is cheap there, they don’t
understand Democracy, and besides, we can’t play cops to the whole
world. Openness to outside influences goes both ways, too: the US generally manages to resist such influences that would curb our abuses.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Custer was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me ... well, I guess not. I was kind of fascinated by him as a kid, probably because the imagery of the doomed last stand is powerful stuff, and read several books about him and his dreadful end as I grew older. Eventually I could no longer see him as a remotely good person, let alone a tragic victim.

I was looking around on Youtube the other night, and found this clip:

That's Buffy Sainte-Marie in the miniskirt and go-go boots, and the Man in Black, Johnny Cash, both of them openly mocking our wounded warriors and fallen heroes on the national TeeVee! I don't object to this myself, but I can't help wondering how it went down in the more timid days of network television in the 60s.

Friday, December 12, 2014

So the US Senate finally released its long-promised report on torture during the first years of Bush's War on Terror, defying warnings by alarmists that it would set off a wave of anti-American violence. As Daniel Larison pointed out:

There was no such concern among hawks about the foreign policy
implications of torturing people when it was being done, and they
expressed no similar worries that other U.S. actions would provoke
violent responses. If one raises the possibility
that aggressive U.S. actions in other parts of the world could have
dangerous consequences for Americans later on, that is normally
denounced as 'blaming' America. Strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to
apply when there is a chance of exposing our government’s egregious
abuses to public scrutiny and having some small measure of
accountability for those abuses.

I've been bemused by the reactions among liberals. Jon Stewart was reportedly so shocked! shocked to learn that there was torture going on it made him want to vomit. No one who was an adult during the 2000s, even in America, can credibly claim not to have known about the US practice of torture at the time: even before the Abu Ghraib revelations, there were plenty of reports of rendition and torture in the media. There was even a fair amount of debate throughout the decade in mainstream as well as marginal media. Nominal liberals like Jonathan Alter and Alan Dershowitz advocated the use of torture before the end of 2001, and urged then-new President Obama to continue the proud tradition. Stewart is old enough to remember all this, so I presume he's going for theatrical effect.

Today Larison linked to a story in the Washington Post which reported that the "bitter Mideast" has reacted to the Senate report with a "shrug." But you know, life is totally cheap in the Mideast, so they don't really care about torture -- they just hate America, because Islam.

... Shadi Hamid, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy [explained]. “This seems like run-of-the-mill stuff in the sense that this is what
people expect of the U.S. They would be surprised if it wasn’t the case,
and that’s a product of years of deep anti-American sentiment,” he
said.

See, the "deep anti-American sentiment" couldn't possibly be the result of US violence, whether direct or by proxy, in the region. They just hate us for our freedoms, I guess. Or for our Freedom Fries.

Arab governments might have been expected to seize on the report, but
their reaction too was muted. That’s in part because many U.S. allies
in the region were directly complicit in the rendition and interrogation
programs. Also, nearly all Arab governments have long employed similar
brutality against their own political prisoners.

“Clearly everyone’s disgusted by it, and I’m sure the extremists will
leap on it as evidence of American perfidy,” said Theodore Karasik, a
regional expert who serves as senior adviser to Dubai-based Risk
Insurance Management.

Well, the report is "evidence of American perfidy"; but then, so is the consistent US support for repressive regimes in the Mideast and elsewhere, another troublesome fact that has the effect of winning recruits to Islamist insurgent groups. Again, as Daniel Larison says, the hawks and their defenders never think that invasion, mass murder, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without trial might produce bad consequences for the US. It's not as if the world's people need Senate reports to know what the US and its allies are doing to them -- their noses are ground in it every day. Only Americans can maintain blissful ignorance about what is being done in our names, and throw tantrums when our sleep is disturbed.

Monday, December 8, 2014

At the public library recently I came across a book called Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time (HarperCollins, 2010) by Kristin Swenson, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. I leafed through it and thought it looked like a convenient summary of current research and knowledge about the Bible for laypeople, so I checked it out. It turned out to be a book I could recommend to people who wanted such a summary, and I was gratified to find that it had little information I didn't already know.

There was one thing I disagreed with strenuously, though. In her discussion of Moses and the Exodus, Swenson tries to find a factual basis for the ten plagues that Yahweh sent to nudge Pharaoh into letting his people go.

Whether or not the plagues of Exodus] really happened is a question we cannot answer for certain. There is no reference to such events in Egyptian sources, and, as noted above, historical accuracy did not seem to be the biblical authors’ primary aim. Although two psalms also list the plagues, they do so in a different order and each includes only seven (probably reflecting a liturgical function), but not exactly the same seven.

One of the most convincing theories of how these events may have transpired presumes a seasonal situation gone bad. Flagellate organisms from Lake Tana worked their way into the Nile during the annual flooding period and sucked up all the oxygen, killing the fish. Frogs migrated out of the flooded river as they normally would but were infected by bacteria, Bacillus anthracis, possibly exacerbated by the decomposing fish.

The biting insects should probably be understood as mosquitoes – not “gnats,” as in many translations. They would have reached unbearable numbers as the high floodwaters receded. As for the flies, well, just imagine all those decomposing critters. It’s possible that at this point, the livestock, which had been safely secured some distance from the floodwaters, became infected with the same anthrax as the frogs. According to Greta Hort, it was transmitted by the fly Stomaxys calcitrans, which bites people and animals alike – perhaps explaining the boils. As for the storm, such weather isn’t common in Egypt, but it isn’t unheard of, either. Swarming locusts are more common, and the occasional khamsin (Arabic for an intense sandstorm) would have made the day seem dark as night. The most likely period for these events would have been August to May, a bit longer than the narrative suggests. The biblical story isn’t explicit about duration [192].

This is euhemerism, an ancient and popular critical tactic which tries to get rid of miracle stories by postulating that the events described actually happened, but were misunderstood or gradually enhanced with marvelous additions. (Or that gods were originally human heroes whose exploits were exaggerated in the retelling.)

Euhemerism has been used to debunk mythology and to defend it. James Barr wrote in Fundamentalism (Westminster Press, 1977) that euhemerism was common in conservative evangelical writing in the 1950s and 1960s, but it also turned up in conservative scholarship of the same period. And, of course, euhemeristic explanations of the Star of Bethlehem circulate every year during Christmas season. In his review of a respectable scholarly 1955 commentary on the gospel of Mark by Vincent Taylor, for example, Morton Smith criticized

T[aylor]'s insistence that the tale "has not yet attained the rounded form of a Miracle-story proper and stands nearer the testimony of eyewitnesses" (ib.) - who fundamentally misunderstood what happened. This objection applies to T.'s treatment of all the major miracle stories. As already noted, 'vivid details' lead him to conclude that every Markan story of Jesus' miracles (except the blasting of the figtree) is told from eye-witness tradition. At the same time, he will not admit that any of the major miracles happened: Jesus did not walk on the sea, but waded through the surf by the shore (p. 327) ; his apparent cure of the Syro-Phoenician's daughter (p. 348) and his apparent stilling of the storm (p. 273) were providential coincidences ('brilliant timing,' Moule, ib.) ; and so on. So Mk.'s 'narrative is everywhere credible' (p. 318) as to everything but what Mk. meant to narrate. Clearly, this position is the product, not of criticism, but of the conflict of two apologetic techniques - to defend Mk. directly by accepting his stories, and to defend him indirectly by getting rid of his miracles.*

The trouble with this strategy, as Smith indicated, is that it tends to rely on "providential coincidences" and "brilliant timing." Moses just happened to dip his staff into the Nile at a time of year when it was going to run red anyway (and the credulous Egyptians, who'd observed such changes before, were taken completely by surprise), and the rest of the "plagues" were just a natural sequence of events that followed in their turn. This sequence of plagues can't be used to verify or date the Exodus, then, since it would probably have occurred numerous times in Egyptian history.

This explanation also falters because, as Swenson admits,

If these nine plagues really did happen in a manner that can be explained as natural events, the tenth cannot. Try as we might (and there are some imaginative theories out there), the tenth and final plague, the death of the firstborn, defies natural explanation. In the story, God instructs the Hebrew people to slaughter a lamb and spread its blood on their doorways before roasting and eating it. That would mark which households to spare as the LORD passed through Egypt, killing firstborn children and even firstborn animals… [192].

Her authority for this "convincing theory," the Danish scholar Greta Horst, seems to have been bolder. I haven't read Hort's articles** completely yet, but I noticed that she did attempt to speculate on a "natural" explanation for the killing of Egypt's firstborn. That should be interesting, because it would also have to explain why smearing blood on the doorframes of the Israelites' houses would protect them. (The story also includes one of those charming revelations of Yahweh's moral character, for he "gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Furthermore, the man Moses himself was greatly esteemed in the land of Egypt, both in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants and in the sight of the people" [Exodus 11:3], but he "said to Moses, 'Pharaoh will not listen to you, so that My wonders will be multiplied in the land of Egypt.' Moses and Aaron performed all these wonders before Pharaoh; yet the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the sons of Israel go out of his land [Exodus 11:9-10]." In other words, it wasn't Pharaoh's fault that he didn't free the Israelites -- Yahweh made him do it, in order to let him show off his power some more.)

Of course the plagues look like "natural events." If Yahweh or any other god (including Nature) sends epidemics, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, etc., then it's possible to describe those events in naturalistic terms. The question for believers, however, is whether those events were literal acts of their gods, and if so, what message the acts were meant to convey. Science can't answer that question; but believers disagree among themselves about the answers.

What I find odd is that although euhemeristic explanations have also been offered for some New Testament stories, as I've indicated, Kristin Swenson only resorts to the tactic in writing about the Exodus. She must know that it's a dubious approach, largely discredited in scholarship about religion. The nineteenth-century theologian David Strauss mounted a strong attack on it in his Life of Jesus[1835-36, translated into English by George Eliot*** in 1846], which provoked a shitstorm of condemnation from the orthodox. (Another act of God, no doubt.) Yet euhemerism moves.